


Acceptance

by INMH



Series: Into Darkness and Beyond [4]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Dark, Drama, Gen, Medical Experimentation, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Semi-Graphic Description of Sexual Assault/Abuse, Sexual Abuse, this got quite a bit darker than I originally planned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2016-11-17
Packaged: 2018-08-31 11:33:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8576884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: STID AU, set after “Isolationist”. “There’s nothing to work through. I made my peace with everything that happened a long time ago. It happened, and it will never happen again. Simple enough.”    MIND THE WARNINGS, PARTICULARLY RAPE/NON-CON INVOLVING A SEVENTEEN YEAR-OLD (which may or may not qualify as Underage depending on where you live.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> IDK man I felt like elaborating on Khan’s remark from Isolationist about getting syphilis once upon a time, whilst also giving some background about how he was raised. Initially I had something else tentatively planned, but then I started getting into what life was like in the facility he was raised in and WHOOPS suddenly we’re having a talk about what happens when medical professionals have no accountability to ethical standards and have free-reign to do all kinds of shit to children in their care.

[ _-1993-_ ]  
  
They were not scientists, they were Aunts and Uncles.  
  
Khan could only assume that they had adopted those ridiculous monikers to give the children a sense of family, of belonging and purpose. It didn’t take long, from his various forays into literature, to realize that real Aunts and Uncles generally don’t take blood from their nieces and nephews every day, nor did they strap them to tables and administer different drugs into their tiny bodies to see what toxins they were able to fight off, and which they weren’t.  
  
He developed a curious sort of double-mind in his young childhood: On one side, he accepted that this was simply his life, a life of strictly regulated meals and training and brutal competition with the other Augment children. There was nothing he or anyone else could do to change it, so there was no point in resistance or rebellion.  
  
On the other, a forever silenced section that he would never acknowledge out loud for fear of the consequences that would surely come, Khan raged and screamed and was so, _so_ bitter about how normal children lived with their mothers and saw them whenever they wanted, but Khan could only see his on certain days at certain hours, and only if he did well on his exercises that week.  
  
But Khan was a good boy. He knew how to keep his mouth shut, however much he didn’t like something. He learned quick and young that it did not matter one bit if you didn’t like something the Aunts or Uncles were doing to you, because they were going to do it anyway even if you didn’t like it and complaining only got them mad.  
  
So he endured.  
  
And fortunately, he was built for endurance.  
  
[---]  
  
At seventeen, Khan had perfected his obedience.  
  
He had become excellent at keeping the angry, mutinous part of his mind locked tightly away. Any time he felt something that might cause him to act out, to question, to resist, away it went into the little locked box along with everything else.  
  
And it was considerably useful, since many of the experiments had ramped up as the Augments had gotten older. There were always increased tests when the group had reached certain milestones in life- the onset of puberty had been unpleasant for more than just the usual reasons that all teenagers shared. Now that they were closing in on adulthood, the Aunts and Uncles wanted to see how their bodies were not only developing, but how their research could be applied in other areas.  
  
One week, Marshall had a swath of skin missing from his back. It was probably painful, but Khan only noticed because he shared a room with Marshall (and four other boys) and saw him with his shirt off after a shower.  
  
“What’s that?”  
  
Marshall didn’t even look at him. “They took some skin; wanted to see if it would work differently applied to a normal person.”  
  
(There was no tacit insult implied towards themselves when they used the word ‘normal’. No, the Augments were not normal: They were _better_.)  
  
Another day, Qadira had walked into the cafeteria wearing sunglasses. That had prompted a few turned heads, but no staring. The only time anyone wore those kinds of glasses was when there were eye-related experiments being done. Khan later heard through the grapevine that needles had been involved in whatever had been done, and experienced a forcibly-contained anxiety at the prospect of _all_ of them having to go through it. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case.  
  
But he had had his own share of nasty experiments.  
  
The problem was, Khan was one of the best- his fellow Augments might have debated that point, but the simple fact that out of the hundred of them, he was probably up in the top ten percent at least. He was one of the most intelligent, one of the strongest, one of the fastest, one of the most _resilient_ of them all.  
  
And so while his position was unquestionably enviable to a group of peers who sought above all else to be the best of the best, it also meant that he tended to be dealt some of the more grueling tests.  
  
There were the electroshock tests designed to test how much electricity his body could handle before it gave out. The scientists were neither insane nor careless; Khan was a seventeen-year experiment in the making as far as they were concerned, and killing him would land them into the sort of trouble most people only dreamed of. But they still pushed as far as they could, until Khan was barely conscious in the chair and having spasms in random parts of his body, the smell of burning skin and hair making him unbearably nauseous.  
  
Then there were the endless battery of drug tests. There were a variety of drugs used, everything from legal drugs like ibuprofen to the illegal ones like MDMA. Those tended to be horrible not just because of the drugs themselves, but because of what had to be done to test them. For instance, they once tested an anti-anxiety medication on Khan- but to make sure it worked, they had to make him anxious.  
  
It had, at the time, been one of the worst experiences in his life. They started off low, testing drugs at various levels with varying amounts of anxiety, but it gradually grew higher. At its peak, it was as though the little box in his brain had broken open, and every ounce of anxiety he’d repressed over the years had come pouring out. And it had taken time for them to find a level of that particular anxiety medication that would bring him down again.  
  
Khan had been about fourteen at the time, and honestly hadn’t thought it could get any worse than that.  
  
But eventually, there came something that would be considerably worse: The psychological tests.  
  
There had been psychological tests throughout his childhood, but they had changed significantly once he was a teenager, had become much more intense, more distressing. The Aunts and Uncles were good scientists, which meant they knew how to conduct a psychological test in a way that would best yield reliable results. And better yet, they didn’t need to follow any of those pesky ethical codes that restricted other doctors from pushing experiments as far as they needed to go to get good results.  
  
Khan had read plenty of books, including ones on psychology, and probably knew those codes better than the Aunts and Uncles did.  
  
For instance, it was generally considered to be unethical to bring a fifteen year-old boy to an empty room and inform him that he wasn’t up to snuff with his counterparts, and therefore he was being euthanized so the facility didn’t waste any more time, energy, or money on a lost cause.  
  
Khan had tried to talk his way out of it, logically arguing his case even when he felt like throwing up. When they’d put the needle in his arm, every single nerve in his body was screaming for him to fight back, to preserve his own life, whilst the logical one told him that there was absolutely no point, as the Aunts and Uncles had numerous resources at their disposal to catch him and kill him anyway, even if he managed to make it off the grounds.  
  
He had slipped off to sleep, and woken up not half an hour later with Uncle Thomas informing him that it had all been a test, and that he’d done well.  
  
That was probably the closest Khan had ever come in his life to jumping up and wrapping his hands around the throat of an adult and _squeezing_ until they were blue-faced and dead on the floor.

It was the closest the little box had ever come to breaking open, closest as he’d ever come to just _exploding_ and forcing him to scream “Why are you doing this to me?! What the _fuck_ did I do to deserve this?!”  
  
But he didn’t.  
  
Because Khan was as much of a good boy at fifteen as he would be at seventeen, and he knew that there was just no point.  
  
And so, like a good boy, he kept  
  
his  
  
mouth  
  
_shut._  
  
[---]  
  
It wasn’t just the testing that had changed as he and the others had gotten older.  
  
Though they were, in all senses of the word, enhanced, the Augments did develop as normal children do. That meant physical development as well as emotional, psychological, and sexual development.  
  
The thing was, each of the Augments had been genetically engineered to be good looking as much as they were to be fast, strong, and intelligent. They were supposed to be aesthetically pleasing- Khan had no doubt that it was partly because the Aunts and Uncles wanted to see if physical attractiveness could be controlled through the genes as much as they liked. The other part was a little more convoluted; the Aunts and Uncles said that it would be ‘useful’ when they were in the field. That led Khan and the others to suspect that at some point they would need to manipulate or seduce people, but under what specific context, they had no idea. No one had ever specified what they would be doing once they were eventually set loose on the world.  
  
Each and every Augment in their batch was, by most standards, handsome or beautiful: Sara’s dark caramel skin was flawless, and her long, black hair was wavy and curled at the ends. At seventeen, Alexi was six feet-tall, heavily muscled, and had a face reminiscent of the sort the Romans had carved into stone. Khan held no particular importance on aesthetics beyond staying as clean and presentable as possible, but he knew he was handsome as well: His clear blue eyes had been complimented on more than one occasion.  
  
From an intellectual standpoint, he knew and believed that his companions were all considerably attractive. But, having spent the majority of his life around each and every one of them, it was difficult to muster anything more than a platonic understanding that they were aesthetically pleasing.  
  
Though Khan knew what sex was and did feel the impulses that came with puberty and near-adulthood, he felt no special need to act out on them with any of his companions. It baffled him somewhat that Zachary and Bruno could willingly decide to stick their tongues down each other’s throats behind a tree on the training grounds outside, or that Daniel could tolerate sliding his hand under Lamina’s shirt to fondle her. They had all been together since the cradle, and would likely be together to the grave; they had never gone more than a few days at a time without seeing each other. Was sexual interaction between them not awkward? Disturbing, even?  
  
Khan had never been inclined to expressing confusion, as others might be quick to use it as an example as to a lower intelligence. But when Joaquin had mentioned becoming intimately involved with Suzette, he’d felt inclined to ask. “It doesn’t bother you?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“That you’ve known her since you were born?”  
  
Joaquin thought about it for a moment, and then shrugged. “No.” A pause. “It bothers you?”  
  
Khan was quick to defend himself, but had years of practice to make sure it didn’t _sound_ like a defense. “It doesn’t bother me,” he lied. In fact, it disgusted him, but that would probably be interpreted as an attack on Joaquin and his preferences, and he was probably the nearest and dearest person to Khan in this facility besides his mother. “But it also doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve known everyone since birth.”  
  
Joaquin grinned. “Enough to know you don’t like them?”  
  
Khan sniffed. “Enough to know I’d prefer someone from outside of the metaphorical gene-pool.”  
  
Joaquin had found that unbelievably funny. “Oh, Khan, if it’s new blood you’re looking for, you might be in for a _long_ wait.”  
  
“Yes, well, unlike _you_ , I can repress my sexual urges, so it’s no great sacrifice.”  
  
And it wasn’t; the urges were there, but frankly, there was no one he cared to act on them with, and even if he had, he couldn’t help but think of how _messy_ it would be to complicate an otherwise simple relationship with another Augment. There was enough competition between them all as it was, and adding romantic and sexual entanglements to it all seemed potentially disastrous.  
  
Well, what they did wasn’t his problem. Khan had never been inclined to picking fights with the others, and that included sticking his nose into non-life-threatening situations. Let them carry on with their pseudo-incestuous behavior: He would neither condone the behavior nor rat them out to the Aunts and Uncles.  
  
It wouldn’t be until later that he’d realize what a wise decision that was.  
  
[---]  
  
There were some Aunts and Uncles that he liked well enough. Of course, whether or not that liking was influenced by the fact that he was _required_ to deal with them day-in and day-out, he wasn’t sure. There were some, however, that Khan very definitively did _not_ like.  
  
Uncle Richard was unpleasant, prone to anger and shouting. Khan and several over the other Augments had been quietly terrified of him as children; once, Miguel had even burst into tears after one of their sessions. He’d received only mild teasing as a result of the incident, with all of them having been so young and equally afraid of the man. Rashid still yelled, but they’d all been through enough at this point to simply tune it out and pretend it wasn’t happening. By seventeen, they’d all learned that there were far worse things than being yelled at.  
  
Aunt Fatima took her role as “Aunt” far too seriously. It had been welcoming when they were very, _very_ small and could still be considered ‘normal’ children by the average definition of that word, but her demeanor towards them had remained the same even as they grew. She spoke to them as though they were still silly little three year-olds, as though she was _actually_ a member of their family and not someone who was being paid to study them; even during some of the more painful experiments, talking to them sweetly as though they were just getting a shot when it was actually _several_ shots and their skin was going to be deliberately burned to test its resilience. Khan found that even more disturbing than being shouted at.  
  
He downright _hated_ just about every Aunt and Uncle that was involved in the mock-euthanization. He knew logically that it was only a test, and that really, you had to _trust_ somebody in the first place in order to feel betrayed by them (he’d never felt anything but a very basic, entry-level trust for almost all of the Aunts and Uncles), but Khan had never been able to shake the intense sense of distrust he felt whenever he was alone with any of those people now.  
  
The only person in the facility he was entirely sure that he loved was his mother, and he was careful to keep thoughts of her away from his mind whenever things with some of the Aunts and Uncles went bad. It prevented him from associating anything unpleasant with her. His mother was, without question, the only person whose presence could immediately calm him.  
  
Khan did not ever- not _ever_ \- allow himself to think too deeply about what his mother did in the facility, and what she knew.  
  
He assumed she knew nothing, and as such, decided to keep her in the dark about some of the more… Distasteful things that went on.  
  
The biggest one, perhaps, was Aunt Nora.  
  
Aunt Nora was a doctor, often responsible for routine medical observation. Khan assumed she was a pediatrician, given that he and his cohorts were just now reaching adulthood, but there was a chance she was knowledgeable beyond childhood medicine if she was employed at such an advanced facility.  
  
What went on with Aunt Nora was a unique sort of ugliness, a new sort of blow to Khan mind; in some ways, it was even worse than the psychological tests.  
  
And that was because he was almost completely sure it wasn’t supposed to be happening at all.  
  
[---]  
  
It started on a Tuesday.  
  
It was a routine medical check that happened every week, unless some extra monitoring was required for some reason. Occasionally something in the Augments’ diets would be changed, something they weren’t told about, and some of them would be monitored at random to see if perhaps their bodies had reacted in some way.  
  
Some of it was inherent: Khan’s senses were heightened, and he was more or less _programmed_ to detect potential threats in his general vicinity. That meant determining if anything in his environment was out of place or behaving suspiciously.  
  
The rest was taught: He and the others had been trained to interpret body language from multiple places and cultures, to determine what movements and positions indicated relaxation, and which ones indicated arousal.  
  
And for the most part, the facility was largely predictable. Apart from the experiments and the controlled instances of training exercises, everyone did what was expected of them. The Augments, despite their competitive natures, were expected to behave appropriately when not training, and so none dared to cause trouble for fear of risking the wrath of the administration (who were not Aunt and Uncles and had no interest in pretending to be so).  
  
But that day, Aunt Nora… Aunt Nora was behaving strangely.  
  
She was staring.  
  
Khan was precise enough in his understanding of body-language to know the difference between a clinical stare (which he should know, having seen it almost every day of his life) and a…  
  
…Well, he wasn’t entirely sure how to classify this stare just yet.  
  
It was intense, certainly. The interest was not clinical. Aunt Nora’s eyes moved quickly, not lingering on one part of his body, but jumping around. Had the stare been more focused, he might have thought she was looking for something specific. But the way her eyes kept moving, leg-shoulder-stomach-thigh-chest-pelvis-throat-leg-stomach, he almost got the impression that she was… Nervous?  
  
Khan, as it happened, was nude, and while a normal teenager might have been self-conscious or uneasy with an adult paying this sort of attention to them in such a state, he and the rest of the Augments were entirely accustomed to it. Obviously, the Aunts and Uncles were too, being doctors and scientists and having been studying them since they were born. Undoubtedly some of the doctors in this facility knew what every inch of Khan looked like, maybe better than Khan knew himself.  
  
“Khan…”  
  
He was already sitting up straight on the examination table, but he straightened a little more on reflex, calmly meeting her eyes. “Yes?”  
  
There was no mistaking it now: Aunt Nora was nervous. It was in the tense slope of her shoulders, the firm line of her mouth, and most of all, her eyes; her eyes above all else said ‘I am extremely nervous about something I have done or am about to do.’  
  
And Khan didn’t know what to make of that until she said,  
  
“Lie down.”  
  
Now, Khan had an exceptional memory.  
  
But in attempting to recall the events following that instruction, whether it was later that same night or two-hundred-fifty years into the future, he would find that there were pieces missing, some moments blurred together, others were clearly out of order. And if he tried to clear the fog away, or reorder the events properly, he would be almost completely unable to do so.  
  
What happened, to the best of his memory, was this:  
  
At some point, Aunt Nora had taken a hold of his penis.  
  
And then she’d begun stroking it.  
  
Khan had gone completely tense; shock, horror, confusion, _what is she doing, stop that, what the hell are you doing Nora-_  
  
She didn’t look him in the eye. Not once.  
  
“Hold still,” She instructed. “It will feel good.”  
  
Khan swallowed, but didn’t move. He wasn’t sure he could, even if he wanted too: There was a chance he’d entered a state of shock. His brain was working overtime trying to figure out what she was doing, what sort of response she was attempting to trigger (other than _that one_ , because of course she wouldn’t be doing _that_ , there was no need for it, she could have just asked him if he was having any trouble in that area, and if she was testing him for something wouldn’t she do what she _always_ did and explain what she was doing in the first place-?)  
  
That was probably what had shocked him so badly. Aunt Nora rarely did anything unusual within the confines of this room that she didn’t explain first. ‘I need to test this’, ‘you’re looking a little pale so I’m going to do this’, etc, etc.  
  
But if she wasn’t testing for something, then that left the most obvious explanation- which is to say, this was a spontaneous sexual encounter, which was coming out of nowhere, more or less. Khan was no more sexually inclined towards Aunt Nora than he was any of the girls his own age in the facility; he’d known her just as long and seen her just as frequently as they.  
  
_Is this a test,_ he wondered. _Is this another test?_  
  
It could be. He thought that nothing would ever top the fake euthanization, but really, this might, if only because Khan had never expected it.  
  
“Do any of your friends touch you like this?” Aunt Nora asked, punctuating the question with a squeeze that felt good, but made him feel sick all the same. The discordance between his brain, which was saying _no no no don’t like it stop_ and his body, which was saying _yes this is good I like this_ , was horrible.  
  
“No,” Khan responded.  
  
It shouldn’t have bothered him, really. It shouldn’t. Because it wasn’t the first time someone had touched his genitals: Being a seventeen year-old experiment meant getting examined and touched a _lot_.  
  
( _But_ , a whisper came from the box, _none of them have ever touched you like **this** before, have they?_ )  
  
And the answer was no, no, none of the Aunts or Uncles had ever touched him or looked at him this way before. Every touch before had been clinical and cold; sometimes invasive, but never quite invasive like _this._  
  
Had this been done in privacy, with someone he actually _wanted_ touching him, he might have enjoyed it. For all his preaching to Joaquin about how he could control his sexual urges, Khan had touched himself before and deeply enjoyed it. He’d had the odd dream here and there where other bodies were pressed against his.  
  
But _this_ …  
  
He didn't like this. He didn’t _want_ this. He didn’t want it at all.  
  
Khan wanted to shove her away, to snarl at her the way he’d snarled at Marshall and Erik when they’d accidentally knocked into him during a wrestling-match in their rooms. “Get off, you idiots!” He’d snapped at them, and _wanted_ to snap now, wanted to say “Stop fucking touching me! This is disgusting! Find someone your own age who _isn’t me!_ ”  
  
But he didn’t say it even though he so badly wanted to, however badly the box in his brain rattled and rocked back and forth and tried to force its way open, because deep, deep, deep down inside, Khan _knew_ that this was not supposed to be happening, _did_  
have a concept of the idea that adults were not supposed to do things like this with teenagers in their care, that doctors were not supposed to touch their patients this way, and that an “ _Aunt_ ” was most certainly not supposed to do these sorts of things to her “ _nephew_ ”.  
  
But she was.  
  
Aunt Nora was doing it, just like the others had done the electroshock tests, and the mock-euthanization test, and every single other test that had ever been run on him, because however powerful Khan or the other Augments were, they were ultimately just children who were and always had been at the mercy of adults that were not as strong as them, not as fast as them, maybe not even as smart as them, but who definitely still had all the power over the Augments’ lives.  
  
And so whether this was a test or something else, Khan knew that there was only one viable solution:  
  
Keep his mouth shut and endure.  
  
Like always.  
  
He stayed still, nausea increasing as things progressed. When he climaxed, he _forced_ himself not to move an inch, screwing his eyes shut and biting into his lip hard enough that he could taste copper. From that day on, if Khan ever had the taste of blood in his mouth whilst in a medical setting, it would bring pulses of this memory to the forefront of his mind.  
  
For a moment, he laid completely still. He forced his eyes open and looked directly up at the ceiling until she said,  
  
“Alright, you’re dismissed.”  
  
[---]  
  
Khan was stricken with a terrible, frantic urge to find his mother, to sit at her feet and wrap his arms around her legs as he’d been allowed to do as a very small child. The logical part of his brain pushed back, demanding calm, demanding control and dignity and that he get himself together. He didn’t need his mother, he needed to sit down and gather his thoughts.  
  
So he moved further down the hall, unable to make himself walk at an easy, normal pace, and hung a sharp right into the room he shared with five others, the closest thing he had to a private space anywhere on the compound. Today, one shining ray of luck: Nobody was in the room, and that fact made Khan’s legs go weak.  
  
_That doesn’t mean let your guard down!_ His brain snarled at him.  
  
It was never simply a matter of _appearing_ to be in control of his emotions: Khan, as were the others, was expected to _be_ in complete control of them. He was better than panic and fear; those were base emotions, instincts from a different time, and the Augments had been engineered to be more than that. They were superior. They were _better_.  
  
…Fuck it.  
  
Khan was going to throw up.  
  
He stepped into the bathroom that adjoined the room and bent over one of the toilets, dry-heaving about seven times before anything actually came up.  
  
He’d done this once or twice before after particularly distressing psychological tests. The euthanization test had been one; the other had been a delightful ruse where he had been ordered to ‘murder’ his mother when he was sixteen. He’d passed that with flying colors, and upon realizing that his mother was not, in fact, dead, he’d excused himself and thrown up for about ten minutes straight.  
  
This, Khan still hoped, would end the same way.  
  
Someone would come in, tell him he left too quickly, that the test had yielded fascinating results and would be carefully noted. And then Khan could relax.  
  
Because if it was a test, it served a purpose.  
  
If it was a test, it explained why Aunt Nora had behaved the way she had.  
  
If it was a test, it probably wasn’t going to happen again.  
  
[---]  
  
It wasn’t a test.  
  
And it did not stop.  
  
[---]  
  
After three months, it became clear enough what this was.  
  
Nora did what she wanted, and Khan kept his mouth shut and played along.  
  
He did not tell his mother.  
  
He did not tell Joaquin.  
  
He did not tell anyone.  
  
She did a lot of things to him. Eventually, she started asking him to do things to her. And Khan did so with a sort of automaton level of efficiency, with no passion or actual desire to participate. The only things he was ever intimate with were the tiles in the ceiling, which garnered more of his interest and attention during those sessions than Nora ever did.  
  
He stopped thinking of her as ‘Aunt Nora’ as well, now. If she wasn’t going to even try to keep up the charade of being a family member, then he didn’t see any particular reason to keep addressing her as one in his head, even if it was still expected of him out loud.  
  
Khan hated his ‘appointments’ with Nora in a way that he had never quite hated anything else before. With the psychological tests, the benefit was that the same test was never repeated twice on the same person: The Aunts and Uncles knew the Augments were too smart to be tricked twice by the same ruse. But that meant that once some awful test was endured, it would never have to be endured again; Khan did not spend his nights paranoid over whether or not he’d be required to fake-kill his mother again.  
  
But this, this random scheduling for an appointment with Nora, it was wearing on his nerves specifically because he knew it was coming and that there was nothing he could do to stop it.  
  
One day, knowing he had an appointment that afternoon, Khan was overcome with a sudden impulse to throw himself off the shaky drawbridge that made up part of the obstacle course he and several of the other male Augments were running through. They’d done this a thousand times, and the course was constantly adjusted to make it more challenging. And from the looks of it, a drop from this height might be enough to break something.  
  
If he broke his leg, he would go to Uncle Jonathan, not Nora.  
  
Of course, then he would also be ruthlessly mocked by the others for failing something he had never failed before.  
  
And while his sessions with Nora made him physically nauseous, made him want to scream and lash out at her, they were done and over with in under an hour. If he earned the mockery of his peers, that would make the remainder of his life outside of the sessions a living nightmare as well.  
  
And God, but he just didn’t need that.  
  
_Weak_ , Khan’s brain hissed at him as he crossed the bridge, still idly contemplating the fall. _Weak, weak, weak. Looking for the slippery way out instead of just steeling yourself and enduring a bit of discomfort. You’re so bothered by a bit of heavy-petting that you’d rather break your leg? **Coward.** What use are you to anything or anyone, if your threshold for discomfort is so low?_  
  
Khan grit his teeth and crossed the bridge without incident.  
  
It was foolish.  
  
He had endured the knowledge that he was about to be euthanized by adults he’d known his entire life, but he couldn’t handle being fondled by one?  
  
_Get over it,_ he told himself, taking those weak, traitorous thoughts and shoving them away. _Get over it. It’s not that bad._  
  
**_Get over it._**  
  
[---]  
  
It was, perhaps, inevitable that when one brought a large group of teenagers together, factions were formed and gossip was spread.  
  
Khan had never paid any special attention to any of it, beyond what he needed to know to operate without incident with certain people. And so perhaps it was by accident that he first caught part of a sentence:  
“-his hand between my legs and started _doing_ things-”  
  
All of the Augments have learned how to keep themselves unheard in a crowd of people with exceptionally good hearing. There was an art to it: lowering your voice in such a way that, at just the right moment when you had cover-noise, you could only be heard by the right person, and keeping your lip-movements as minimal as possible to reduce being identified as the speaker.  
  
It was an accident that Khan heard this particular whisper.  
  
But once he started listening, there were other whispers too:  
  
‘Aunt Rachel’ and ‘check-up’ and ‘under my bra’.  
  
‘Uncle Robert’ and ‘hand on my thigh’.  
  
‘Uncle Jeremiah’ and ‘in my pants’.  
  
‘Aunt Susan’ and ‘twice this month’ and ‘not feeling well’.  
  
It would not have been difficult to say ‘Aunt Nora’ and ‘three times just in the last week and a half alone’ and ‘rashes’ and ‘feverish’.  
  
First off, there was the simple fact that some of the Aunts and Uncles in the facility were someone’s Mother or Father. Khan was lucky enough that his own mother never performed any experiments, only oversaw them from time to time (she was involved in the administration aspect of the facility, though she had never told him precisely which position she was in). But Nora- as well as some of the others that were whispered about- was a Mother. She was Daniella’s mother. And Khan was not entirely willing to risk alienating Daniella, who was not known for her kindness, by muttering about the humiliating things her mother had done to him.  
  
But even more than that, they had all been raised to be competitive with one another, and Khan especially had found that he was good at guarding himself against potential threats, emotionally and physically. He rarely acknowledged it, but he hadn’t been the most… _resilient_ child. He’d cried a great deal as a toddler, had clung to his mother when he’d been able to. And he had been mocked without mercy for it until he was about thirteen, when he’d twisted Kristoff’s arm until his shoulder had been wrenched completely out of the socket, and then beaten him mercilessly.  
  
After that, the other Augments said nothing of his former weakness. They didn’t dare.  
  
But while Khan liked and even loved many of the people in this group in his own way, he was not at all inclined to risking further mockery or pity. He had done his damndest to prove that he was stronger than all of them, and he would not risk losing the reputation he had gained because he couldn’t deal with some sexual impropriety from an adult that had done considerably more painful things to him in the past.  
  
Knowledge was power, as they said, and the less people who what Nora did, or knew that Uncle Anthony had given him some medication to take and instructions not to breathe a word about what it was for, the better.  
  
Besides, even if he did tell, what good would it do?  
  
There was nothing anyone could do about it anyway.  
  
[ _-2259-_ ]  
  
Leonard McCoy’s mouth was hanging open slightly.  
  
The man was excitable, and so it wasn’t anything new to see him astonished over something. Although Khan wasn’t sure what it was about his story that was so shocking: Surely the good doctor had heard of adults taking advantage of children in their care? Or had that crime been eradicated in this _enlightened_ day and age as well?  
  
“Jesus Hop-Scotching Fuck-Face Christ.”  
  
Khan snorted before he could stop himself. “Creative.”  
  
“They just…” McCoy waved his hand helplessly. “How… How many of those people- I’m _not_ calling them Aunts and Uncles, you were right when you said that that was some brainwashing cult-bullshit- but how many of them were doing this?”  
  
Khan sighed and rolled his eyes shut as he counted.  
  
Among the women, there was Nora, Rachel, Sadie, Susan, and Mikaela.  
  
Among the men, there was Robert, Jeremiah, Andrew, Pascal, Donald, Benjamin, and Luis.  
  
“Twelve, that I was and am aware of.”  
  
McCoy slowly shook his head. “How long did it go on? It started when you were seventeen, and ended…?”  
  
“When I was twenty-two.”  
  
“Five years. Jesus. And your mom, she had no idea?”  
  
Khan barely managed to restrain an impulsively savage response. McCoy’s voice had a vaguely accusatory undertone to it, and Khan would have none of it. “She was entirely unaware of what was going on.”  
  
“You never told her?”  
  
“No. There was nothing she could do, so I saw no point in distressing her over it.”  
  
“But I thought she worked with these people. _Over_ these people, since you said she worked in administration. She had _no_ idea?”  
  
Khan’s eyes narrowed. “They weren’t pulling our pants down and fucking us in the middle of the hallway, McCoy. It was usually in the privacy of an examination room, where we wouldn’t be walked in on. They did not broadcast what they were doing, and we were smart enough to keep our mouths shut.”  
  
“Did Nora do this with any of the others, or just you?”  
  
“Just me. I’m certain.”  
  
“You said one of the boys came down with something?”  
  
“Joaquin. We didn’t discuss it, but I suspect it was syphilis as well.”  
  
“Khan, do you…?” McCoy still looked fairly horrified at all of this information. “Do you need to talk to someone about this? There are psychologists, counselors, they can help if you-”  
  
“I hardly see the point,” Khan cut in. “I’m already speaking about it with you, aren’t I?” And really, that he only felt a very mild pulse of anxiety, a small wave of nausea, was a testament to how well he’d managed to work over these memories in his head, beat them and stomped on them until he could think of them without sinking into the anger and confusion and upset and helplessness he’d felt as a teenager.  
  
“I mean with someone who’s better equipped to help you work through any baggage you might have from… All of that,” McCoy finished uneasily.  
  
“There’s nothing to work through. I made my peace with everything that happened a long time ago. I was a child at the mercy of an adult who had a great deal of power over my life. It’s a common-enough story, I think. It happened over two-hundred years ago, and it will never happen again. Simple enough.”  
  
McCoy didn’t look convinced. His expression wasn’t one of pity, but rather… It was almost like wariness. Like he expected Khan to explode at a moment’s notice, maybe start knocking over tables and projectile vomiting. But there was also concern as well. Like he would actually care if Khan was as distressed by these thoughts as McCoy thought he was.  
  
“Khan, you were assaulted.”  
  
“I was of the legal age at the time.”  
  
“You didn’t _consent._ ”  
  
Khan gave a dark chuckle. “I didn’t consent to a lot of the things that went on in that facility, Doctor. It was another drop in the bucket, that’s all.” He calmly shaded in another part of the nacelles he was drawing into his diagram. He’d found that utilizing the technological information he’d received from his time in Section 31 was going a long way in keeping his mind occupied for the time being. “Some drops are bigger, some are smaller, but ultimately they all just merge into a giant puddle of water at the end of the day, don’t they?”  
  
McCoy let out a long sigh. It had an edge of defeat to it, like he had _finally_ grasped that Khan had told him this information because recalling it no longer bothered him, and not because he was making some convoluted cry for help. “Fine. Fine.”  
  
Khan didn’t look up from the sketch as he said, “I presume you’ll be informing the Captain of my history?”  
  
“Boy, it’s obvious you haven’t had a lot of dealings with ethical medical professionals. No, Khan. The paperwork isn’t all filed yet, but for all intent and purpose, I’m your doctor. You shared that information with me in confidence, and I don’t share private medical information, psychological or physical, unless I think you pose an immediate threat to yourself or someone else. And any doctor who _does_ share that sort of information willy-nilly deserves to lose their goddamn license.”  
  
Khan glanced up.  
  
McCoy was giving him a hard, determined look, and for a moment he was reminded of Kirk. It wasn’t difficult to see why these two men were friends: They clearly shared a similar spirit with one another. They were stubborn, reasonably honest, and had an almost painfully good nature as far as their ability to show goodwill to other was concerned. Khan wasn’t under the illusion that it was easy for either of them to show him the generosity towards him that they had.  
  
He looked back down at the diagram to see where he could touch it up.  
  
“Whatever you say, doctor. I suppose time will tell whether that’s true or not.”  
  
“Yeah,” McCoy responded without flinching. “You will.”  
  
-End


End file.
